Surgery can be the best option for treating various diseases and/or for treating traumatic injuries to a patient, yet even minimally-invasive surgical procedures can result in trauma to various anatomical structures and other risks. Iatrogenic injury can occur such as excessive bleeding, ischemia, infection, and nerve injury. As nerves are being separated from scar tissue or adjacent tissue, surrounding blood vessels and/or nerves can be unintentionally injured. Ischemia and/or nerve injury can also result from prolonged tissue retraction, which can be necessary when a surgeon is separating tissues to access a surgical site. As the duration of surgery increases, the risk of excessive blood loss and infection can also increase.
Surgical procedures involving the spine typically require that a surgeon identify and manipulate various regions and types of tissue. For example, a surgeon can separate or dissect tissue to create a pathway to a surgical site and/or to create space for insertion of an implant. Creating a desired pathway can be cumbersome, time-consuming and require extensive surgical exploration. This process can also cause unintended damage to tissue surrounding the pathway. Once the surgeon has access to the spine, tissue in or around the spine can be manipulated in various ways. For example, spinal fusion is a common method of treating patients with severe back pain. Exemplary fusion procedures can include removing the disc material prior to inserting a fusion cage and adding bone growth material into the disc space, which can then grow into a solid and stable construct. However, removal of the disc can be a difficult and time consuming process and can cause iatrogenic injury to the surrounding tissue. Other exemplary procedures that require dissection and/or separation of tissue include laminectomies and spinal disc replacements.
It is often necessary or desirable to perform revision surgery in which a treatment performed in a prior surgery is corrected in some way (e.g., adding additional implant hardware to a previously-implanted construct, removing previously-implanted implants, adjusting a previously-implanted construct, etc.). Revision surgeries can be associated with additional risks. For example, scar tissue and adhesions may form on vital structures such as blood vessels and nerves after the original surgery. This can make creating surgical access to the target site very difficult and dangerous since it is difficult to differentiate the scar tissue from the vital structures and often the scar tissue needs to be tediously dissected away, potentially causing prolonged surgery time.
Tissue in or surrounding the spine can cause the spine to resist surgical correction. While screws, rods, and other stabilization components can help correct the deformity, untreated surrounding tissue can restrict the ability of these implants to correct the spine and can thus interfere with the desired surgical outcome.
Accordingly, there is a continual need for systems and methods that are less invasive to a patient and that can reduce the risks and challenges of correcting pathologies via a surgical procedure.